Is it economically efficient to capture and bury carbon dioxide?
Last year, the UK government launched a £1bn competition and a £125m R&D initiative to fund CCS technology - but does this offer the taxpayer value?
The long term sustainability of our energy infrastructure depends on intelligent and forward looking innovation.. The current scheme, however, goes against one of the golden rules of sustainability, reduce, reuse, recycle.
If you assume that our economies will only grow through efficiency gains and that resource depletion clearly points towards the need for efficient closed cycle processes, spending over £1bn on CCS makes little sense.
The grand idea behind this policy is that there is a possibility that CCS will becomes a billion dollar industry, where countries around the world will ship billions of tonnes of compressed carbon and pay the industries to store it underground.
Some politicians argue that with depleting gas reservoirs in the North Sea offering large storage facilities we should strive to capture this market, for the good of the UK or Scottish economy.
But to be successful carbon capture would have to overcome some major hurdles:
- CCS results in an energy penalty, in other words, we have to use energy to capture, compress, transport and bury carbon from power stations.
- CCS uses mature technologies (amine scrubbers, compressors, network of pipes, etc.) that are arguably close to their efficiency peaks, unlike – say – offshore wind.
- This energy penalty currently means that approximately a quarter of energy produced for sale would be dedicated to the CCS process.
- CCS requires massive infrastructure development, creating lock-in or the risk of stranding assets.
- CCS is not a clean process, it produces toxic amine compounds.
- Finally, we are currently unsure if we can guarantee the long term storage/sequestration of carbon.
The energy penalty is translated into a financial penalty. What that means is that CCS doesn’t improve productivity – it simply makes generating power more expensive.
The question we need to answer is how do we create value from carbon capture and what do we need to do to stimulate the value creation process? Innovative materials such as grapheme and nanotubes are carbon based. This means that they are made using carbon in the same way that steel is made using iron ore.
A visionary policy would go from the regressive view of capturing carbon and burying it to a policy that would support carbon capture as part of the value chain for new industry. Under the concept of a circular economy carbon production should therefore be driven by the need for carbon as a useful resource, not for energy.
